The Name On The Rescue Plaque

Gone before I could say it

I got up the bank to my boys. I had my youngest in one arm and my oldest clamped against my side, and I was saying their names over and over, and I was shaking so hard I could not hold the baby steady.

When I finally looked up to find the man, to say the only word there was to say, he was walking away.

He was already up near the road. He had on a canvas work coat gone dark with water and a cap, and he was tall and thin, and he did not look back. He got into a pickup I had not noticed parked up on the shoulder past the crossing. An older truck, a faded color, I want to say green but I have never been sure and I will not pretend I am.

I called out. I know I did, because my throat was raw after. But the rain was loud and the water was loud and my own boys were loud, and he either did not hear me or did not want to.

He pulled out and drove off over the hill, away from town.

I remember standing there thinking he would come back. People do not just do that and leave. I was sure he had gone to get help, that he would be back with the volunteer fire truck, that I would see him again in ten minutes.

A county road grader came by not long after and the driver radioed in, and then there were lights and blankets and a deputy and an ambulance for the boys, who were checked over and found to be nothing but cold and scared and perfect.

The man never came back. Nobody at the scene had seen him. The grader driver had not passed any truck. It was as if the creek had sent him and then taken him back.

The knife on the dash

They pulled my car out two days later when the water dropped.

It had lodged against a deadfall a hundred yards downstream, full of silt, ruined. The deputy let me go through it for the car seats and anything of the boys’.

That is when I found the knife.

It was sitting on the dashboard, right in the middle, up against the windshield where the defrost vents are. Bone handle, yellowed, worn smooth from a man’s pocket. A single folding blade, closed. Water had been all through that car and silt was in every corner of it, but the knife sat up there on the dash as if it had been set down on a kitchen counter.

I knew right away it was his. I do not know how, but I knew. It had not been in my car before. It was not my husband’s. It was placed there, set down flat and square, by a man who had three times reached into that car and knew exactly where that dashboard was.

I turned it over in my hand. On the flat end of the handle, stamped into the bone with a little metal die, were two letters.

R and H.

That was all. Two capital letters, a quarter inch tall, pressed in crooked the way a man does it himself with a punch and a hammer at a workbench, not the way a factory does it.

R.H.

I stood in the county impound lot in the cold with silt drying on my sleeves and I held the only thing I had of the man who gave me back my children, and it told me two letters and nothing else.